Civilization V

Our final game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.

Civilization V is an interesting game due to the fact that it puts the 7790, GTX 650 Ti Boost, and 7850 so close together in performance. It stresses just about everything at some point – tessellation/geometry, ROP throughput, compute, and texturing – but it’s really shading/texturing that form the biggest bottleneck here. This works out well enough for NVIIDA, allowing them to get within 4% of the 7850, while still keeping the GTX 650 Ti Boost and GTX 660 well separated.